Michael Hogan reviews the first episode of Hannibal, a TV drama series based
on characters from Thomas Harris's novel Red Dragon.

Prequels portraying much-loved characters in their youth are all the rage. In the past few years we’ve had Inspector Morse, James Herriot and Del Boy Trotter. It's now the turn of everyone’s favourite flesh-scoffing psychopath. Hannibal (Sky Living) was a glossy NBC drama about Dr Lecter before he got caught and became a Hollywood bogeyman.

Brit actor Hugh Dancy stole the show as criminal profiler Will Graham, who was somewhere on the autistic spectrum and had a spooky ability to put himself in the blood-spattered shoes of killers. The opening scene was flashily filmed as Graham mentally rewound the slaughter of a family in their own home, making Sherlock-ish deductions along the way. He had night-sweats and sad eyes because of all the things he’d seen, but he also adopted stray dogs so we knew he was a goodie really.

Dastardly Danish film star Mads Mikkelsen didn’t appear until the halfway point, playing Lecter as an imperious dandy who looked unnervingly like Vladimir Putin. Or a tailor’s dummy that had been left by the radiator and melted slightly. The cannibalistic boffin was hired by the FBI to both assist and psychoanalyse the unstable Graham. Scenes between the two fizzed with chemistry. They danced around each other with near-flirtatious dialogue, the line between hero and villain blurring intriguingly. Lecter saved a girl’s life and held her hand in hospital, but we knew he was a baddie really, thanks to little clues like how he breakfasted on human sausages and cut up lungs with the dispassionate detachment of a bored butcher.

This was classy, creepy, handsomely shot horror. There were gallons of blood but little graphic violence, so it didn’t feel too ghoulish.